[derefr]

The religion of speed is the religion of VC investment backing, because VCs have set time horizons for delivering returns to their own investors. You can only get their interest if you can make them believe you can deliver 10x growth on their schedule.

Committing to that schedule — and really believing in that commitment — is what turns someone into the sort of person who sets arbitrary project timelines that disregard technical practicality, and then kills projects when they fail per those arbitrary timelines.

[nine_k]

These timelines are not arbitrary. They are dictated by the cost of money (for the VC). They have little to do with the target market situation, and totally don't care about technical considerations. They only care if your profits, or at least revenue, or at least market share grows fast enough. If it does not, they write off their losses and liquidate the company.

This is the fear that dictates the damned speed™: either you go up insanely fast, or you die. If your goals do not align with this approach, do not take VC money. If you want to develop things without haste, only join a startup with a proven PMF and insanely goos sales team, which takes care of hockey- stick growth so that you can concentrate on quality.

[derefr]

I never said the VC's timeline is arbitrary! They're ultimately based in loan interest rates / bond yields / etc — as you say, the "cost of money."

But the timelines that founders and CEOs can end up coming up with for the arbitrary subprojects/efforts they choose to pursue to try to get the company closer to giving those VCs the hockey-stick growth they demand, are much more arbitrary. Mostly in the sense that such subprojects/efforts can often be selected/pursued with no thought to the fact that either the goal is technically impossible within the chosen time budget; or, even if possible, that the effort won't demonstrate results within the chosen time budget, and so will be given up on whether or not it's working (because founders interpret absence of metrics as metrics relaying absence.)

Which is to say: if you can guarantee from before you start that a given subproject or effort will be considered "a failed experiment" — then you'd think it would be obvious that you shouldn't do that one. That you should put it on the backlog of things you can try after PMF + hockey-stick growth, when you have time to evaluate things thoroughly.

But that doesn't seem to be obvious to a lot of founders and CEOs. Many of them spend a lot of their and their employees' time setting off on efforts that everyone in the room basically already knows they'll be cancelling two weeks later, before said effort has had a chance to either succeed or fail on its merits.

[21asdffdsa12]

The rocket equation of a turtle egg..

[ymolodtsov]

Venture-backed companies is an extremely small subset companies when you look at this objectively.

The alternative is debt financing, and let me tell you, there's a lot more deadlines and urgency in there.

[Aurornis]

If you want to feel real urgency, try working at a company attempting to bootstrap without VC funding. Unless your company is very lucky to strike gold early on, the pressure to deliver fast and get money coming in is even more real. Everyone wants to start getting paid real salaries instead of eating ramen noodles. Everyone wishes they could hire a few more people to spread the workload around.

Startups are very hard, period. In my experience, the ones that get VC funding are a less stressful than those that don’t because you start with a generous buffer of money in the bank and you have investors who might backstop the company’s bank account if you run out. They do want returns, but bootstrapped companies also want returns too. That bootstrapped founder who sacrificed potential earnings for years to get their startup off the ground wants employees delivering fast, too.

It’s not a religion or cult. It’s the reality of startups. Something is risked to start them and the people who risk it expect a larger reward than they would have received. For VCs, that larger reward has to be better averaged returns than investing in the stock market or other investments. For founders, that large reward needs to be larger wealth than what they could have gotten working for FAANG. The pressure comes either way.

[gavmor]

I like setting arbitrary project milestones or timelines. They don't have to kill the project, but it's good to cast efforts in relief against external developments.

[BrenBarn]

It's not just technical practicality that's disregarded, it's nearly everything valuable about anything that's worth doing. It's why VC is a cancer on the world.